Philip K. Dick's Interesting Facts

Philip K Dick graduated from Berkley High School class of 1947 with future science fiction writer Ursula (Kroeber) Le Guin, but they didn't know each other.

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Philip K Dick got the idea for "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" when he found an Auschwitz Nazi Officer's Diary in the Stacks of his University's Library. It read "The screaming of children keeps me awake", so Philip K Dick decided the man had become an Android.

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In 2005, scientists created an android with a head resembling Philip K. Dick that was programmed to respond to queries with responses appropriate to the author. The android also could "recognize" friends and family. When "introduced" to Dick's daughter Isolde ("Isa") Dick Hackett, the android launched into a tirade denouncing her mother, Nancy Hackett. Isa found the experience to be unpleasant. The head of the android eventually was lost during a trip on an airliner. The android was flying to Santa Ana, California, where Dick died in 1982, which Isa found to be a fitting end for her tormentor.

The story "Minority Report" by Philip K. Dick was originally adapted as a sequel to Viska prisiminti (1990) by writers Ronald Shusett and Gary Goldman, later joined by Robert Goethals. The setting was changed to Mars with the Precogs being people mutated by the Martian atmosphere, as established in the first film. The main character was also changed to Douglas Quaid, the man played by Arnold Schwarzenegger. The project eventually fell apart but the writers, who still owned the rights to the original story, rewrote the script, removing the elements from Total Recall (1990). This script was eventually tossed out when novelist Jon Cohen was hired in 1997 to start the project over from scratch. The only original element from the early script which made it to the final Minority Report (2002) film is the sequence in the car factory, an idea that Steven Spielberg loved.

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Before he died, he saw about 20 minutes of Blade Runner (1982), mostly-completed special effects shots with some sound effects and no music. Dick, who had been cynical about it beforehand, left the screening pleasantly stunned with what he had seen.

A recurrent motif in many of Dick's stories involves the collapse of an artificial reality; the main character discovers that his entire world has been mechanically imposed on his psyche and that "reality" is vastly different. Other uses of "alternate realities" also figure in some of his novels and stories.